The Last Days of New Paris

“Because that was where there was a star that wasn’t crossed out.”

“I mean why eventually? Why didn’t you go hunting straightaway?”

“Oh.” He keeps his eyes on the horizon. “I persuaded them to wait.” His comrades had not known what for, but they had agreed. “I’d heard something about that other plan you mentioned. Never knew the details. Just that it was some assault. I thought we should wait, see if we heard anything. In case it succeeded.” She says nothing so he must continue.

“It didn’t,” he whispers. “It went wrong. Chabrun, Léo Malet and Tita, a lot of others. They died.”

“I heard,” Sam says. “Do you know what happened?”

“I think the enemy got wind of it. They hit first. And they must’ve had some…weapon.” He bares his teeth. “I don’t know exactly what but our people — it was the best of us who died. The best. The Nazis must’ve had something ready to go into those streets.” He could, might have been there, with the now-dead. Then he would be dead, too.

Except if his presence would have changed things.

Thibaut had fought the Carlingue once, alongside Laurence Iché. A day full of flat light, the two of them patrolling, she showing the rookie the area. A routine sweep of a quiet zone. Expecting nothing, they walked into the remains of a battered lot, and an ambush.

He had hurled himself screaming for cover, trying to shoot as he went, trying to bring training to mind as he cowered under fire. When he turned and hauled himself half upright, Iché was stood there in her grubby floral dress, still smoking hard, ignoring all the bullets that crashed around her, raising her right arm.

She roared and a too-big eagle appeared and plunged straight for the men gathered at the cul-de-sac’s entrance. As Thibaut cowered and watched the wings beat down on them and they gasped and tried to run she had said something else and made a caterpillar longer and fatter than a horse with the head of a wicked bird, and it rippled after the eagle over the shattered brick. Thibaut heard cries and wet noises. Iché brought a bathtub full of glimmering, shredded mirror into presence and sent it skittering on its claw feet into the slack-faced Gestapo commander. It bumped him and caught him with all its grinding scintillas. He screamed and sent up a spray of blood and reflections.

“I saw Iché manifest her own poems once,” he says. “Not many could do that.”

“Maybe your comrades had some secret weapon, too,” Sam says. “I heard things.”

“So you keep saying. I don’t know. I don’t know if they had what they wanted. If there was anything.”

“Well, there were stories. About a fight. Between something manif of theirs — yours—and something Nazi—”

“I heard rumors, too,” Thibaut interrupts, making her blink. “If they had a secret weapon it didn’t fucking work, did it?”

“Is that why you’re leaving?” Sam says after a moment. He does not reply. “What was it happened in the forest?” she says. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I should’ve fucking left then,” he says. “As soon as I heard about that fiasco. That they were gone. But I stayed. We all stayed. Decided to follow the map.”

His cell. Around a fire. Drinking to the memory of the dead. The identities of whom they were not even quite sure. They knew, though, from the tenor of the rumors they had already heard, the transmissions in garbled code passed on by runners at arrondissement edges, reaching them at last, from the shift in the atmosphere, for those like Thibaut who could feel it, that this failed assault changed things. That a chance had been lost, for their side.

None of them slept that night, after the word reached them, word they could not be sure was true but were quite sure was true. They gathered together and talked quietly, tried to reconstruct which of the great booms across the city that they’d heard over the last week had been the noise of their comrades falling, according to what bad powers.

Those who’d known them spoke about their times with those they thought gone. He had troubled his comrades, though, because Thibaut would tell no such stories of those who’d inducted him. He would say nothing. He fingered the Marseille card and thought of the scout who had come for him, whom he had turned away.

After his refusal, that woman who had crossed such dangerous ground to find him had not spoken again. Someone else might have begged, or insisted. There was a long silence, and he made himself meet her eyes, and when at last she was certain he meant it she turned without a word and ascended the stairs.

After a second’s hesitation he went after her. On the ground floor he had found Élise standing in confusion by a door that was ajar onto a backyard with a broken wall, the night and the streets, and the woman who had come unseen by any of his comrades now gone again the same way, back to whatever was being planned, without him.

Later the names. Hérold. Raufast. Rius. Iché. That sickening roll-call.